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IBM Patents Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Movies
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, whose former patent boss is in charge of the USPTO these days, and which claims to support patent reform, has just been awarded a patent on choose-your-own-adventure style movies, despite plenty of prior art. Whatever happened to fixing the patent system, rather than continuing these mistakes?"
Ahem, Scourge of Worlds - A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure (2003) would like a word here.
http://www.amazon.com/Scourge-Worlds-Dungeons-Dragons-Adventure/dp/B00009KU8L
From the description: Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons and Dragons Adventure is not a film sequel to Dungeons and Dragons (2000), but the DVD equivalent of an interactive role-playing novel. There are over 900 short digitally animated sequences, leading every so often to a choice to be made with the remote control, resulting after about 90 minutes in one of four possible endings.
Sorry IBM, your prior art is sitting in a card board box in my basement.
I skimmed through the claims. I've seen and participated in public showings of technology that covers most of this. Some commenters mentioned the Dragon's Lair laserdisc arcade game, which I was never very good at. I've also seen interactive stories (both pre-recorded and realtime rendered) where the audience votes at various points in the story; sometimes it was computer vision based, and sometimes we had devices with voting buttons (including our own cell phones). Students in Carnegie Mellon's ETC have created a number of public demonstrations along these lines. But the important claims in this patent that I haven't seen before are:
- Your individual vote's weighting is based on your ticket price
- The total story arc that the audience voted for is saved for future viewing
- The audience votes on the total story arc, so that future audiences can pick the most popular arc
That's where to start looking for prior art. I don't remember whether prior art has to exist for all claims or just one claim in order to invalidate the patent, but Claim 1 describes the entire setup with all of these parts.
Dragon's Lair, mid 1980s? It was a coin operated video game that basically played animated scenes from a laserdisc. Your inputs decides which way things forked at key points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair